Category Archives: Uncategorized

Leopard, iterm, zsh, X11

For some reason, now that I’ve moved to Leopard, every time I start an iterm shell, X11 opens up too. I use zsh as my shell, because I have some fancy .zshrc fu – much of which isn’t working any more, like the tab completion stuff – and I wondered if it has something to do with that. But it keeps happening when I move to other shells.

Any thoughts?

Meanwhile, when I try to tab-complete a filepath, I get:

_path_files:569: command not found: _list_files

and then the tab completion happens anyways.

I wish zsh wasn’t quite so much black magic to me.

Greylisting – the results


And, here’s the results. You can, I’m sure, immediately pick out the point where I turned on the greylisting service. It’s not a complete solution – I still get some spam – but you can see from the graph that I’m getting around 1/3 as much inbound mail as I was getting before.

It’s even more pronounced if you look at the month view

Notice that it affects the sent, as well as received, because so much of my outbound email was reject and bounce messages.

New Webcam

A few weeks ago, we bought a webcam at work, and got the wrong model. The model that we wanted has an extra A on the end of it.

The extra A made all the difference. I plugged it in, pointed a browser at it, and got streaming video, immediately. There’s a web-based admin tool that doesn’t require any special installation, or IE, or Windows, or ActiveX.

There *is* a Windows-only management tool, which I couldn’t get to work under Parallels. The reason for this was that it searched its own subnet for the device, and the way that parallels works, it’s not on the same subnet as the device, but rather on a private subnet hidden in the bowels of the virtual machine.

So, I’m very pleased with the new camera, and hope to have a webcam up on the Asbury website shortly. It’s more than a little weird to me that two almost-indistinguishable devices would be so very different.

New Toys

I picked up a couple new toys this weekend. One, in particular, I’m very fond of. I got an iPod Touch, for use as my primary PDA, calendaring, note-taking, mobile computing thingy. Overall, I’m *way* impressed with it. It’s quite a feat of engineering.

What I found frustrating about it from the very beginning – even before I had one – was the lack of availability of third-party applications for it. Granted, it’s a very young device. I had a Palm device more than 10 years ago, and even then there were hundreds of third-party apps for Palm. Now there are thousands. And for the iPod, I can’t find any.

Now, I know there are some, and that you can install them if you install hackish jailbreak software on the iPod. And, I’ll probably do this. But I find it perplexing that a company as savvy as Apple would choose to release a device that didn’t from day one, make it easy for third-party companies and hobbyists to provide apps for it. Nothing inspires device loyalty like an app that fills just exactly the need that you have. And, frankly, the default apps on the iPod are unimaginative. And … duh … no games. Who thought that made sense? At least put solitaire on here. Sheesh.

Having said that, the ease of use of the device, and the obviousness of use, impress me. There’s never a doubt of what you’re supposed to do to accomplish what you want.

One other complaint, I guess. The networking hides just a little too much detail from me. I needed to know my MAC address this afternoon, so that I could add the device to the permit list on my parent’s 802.11 AP, and I couldn’t find it anywhere. It’s one of the Linksys devices, and I had to pick my device out of a list of other devices that had tried to access the AP, presumably neighbors, and I just couldn’t do it in the time I had available.

Oh, well, mostly thumbs up, and I imagine I’ll like it more, the more I rely on it.

Greylisting

For quite some time, I’ve wanted to implement greylisting on my mail servers. But, to be honest, every time I looked at the greylisting howtos, they just made me feel stupid. Rather than telling me what to do to implement greylisting, they’d discuss the benefits of greylisting, and link to three other tutorials that did much the same thing. Some of them would partially describe an implementation, and leave the actual details to you, or perhaps reference a Perl script that may or may not be included in your particular MTA, and here’s a partial copy of it which may or may not work.

So, every time I tried to implement it, I ended up giving up in disgust.

I’ve just discovered Greyfix, which is a greylisting policy daemon that gets enabled by adding a line to main.cf, and one to master.cf. It took me 5 minutes to download, compile, and enable, and I have received TWO pieces of spam since I enabled it, while still receiving all of my regular email that I expected to receive. It is, by far, the most effective spam prevention measure I have ever implemented, bar none.

The basic premise of greylisting is that when someone sends you email, rather than accepting it, you say “why don’t you try that again a little later, ok?” If it’s a spammer, they’re trying to deliver millions of messages a minute, and the don’t have time to come back and try later. If it’s legitimate email, it gets put in the queue, and redelivered later. So it’s delayed a little, no big deal. If it’s someone that sends you a lot of email, then once they’ve successfully delivered something, they get put on the approved list, and don’t have to wait the next time. The consequence is that almost all spam gets dropped as undeliverable, and everything that came from an actual mail server gets delivered.

A very simple concept, and it’s always frustrated me that it was so difficult to actually implement. Turns out I was just looking at the wrong implementation.

ClearMyRecord.com

After agonizing over this for several months, I’ve decided to accept a new job and leave Asbury College.

Something like 30 million Americans have some kind of criminal record which is eligible for relief. That is, they have stayed clean for 10 years, and want to get on with their lives. In theory, their record has expired. In reality, they have to fill out a stack of paperwork, which then goes to a judge. Pretty much a rubber stamp process, but a hassle.

But even then, it’s not over. Because getting criminal records from the government is such a hassle, there are 30+ companies which make criminal records searchable online. And when the record gets cleared with the government, there’s no guarantee that those other companies will purge their database.

So, that’s where we come in. EAS – Expungement Assistance Services – provide a service where the client gives us some information, and we get the paperwork done, AND ensure that all of the online databases are purged, so that these folks can get their lives back.

Criminal records are a much bigger deal than they once were. Increasingly, since 2001, it’s become a quick way to lose your job due to a background check. Folks who have worked for the Post Office for 40 years, or been a high school teacher for 40 years, are suddenly losing their job due to a shoplifting charge from when they were 18. And in several southern states, including Kentucky, one in four african-american men can’t vote in the upcoming election due to their criminal record. Most of these men are eligible for that record to be expunged.

We don’t accept clients whose crime involves minors, or whose crime was of a sexual nature. This isn’t about putting hardened criminals back into the work force. It’s about restoring dignity to people who have demonstrated that they can return to being good citizens, and want to get on with their lives.

Anyways, I’m going to be the manager for the automation, web-based side of things. Up until now, this has been a very person-intensive, paper-intensive process. We’re moving it to the web, and letting the client do a lot of the work themselves, in privacy and confidentiality, rather than having to discuss their past with a stranger. It’s more complex than it sounds, because not only does each state have its own regulations, but in many places, each COUNTY has its own regulations, so there are hundreds of forms, and thousands of combinations of forms, that any individual may have to fill out.

I have nothing but good things to say about Asbury College. The time there was great. The people are great. My boss, and his boss, and his boss, and his boss, are all exceptional individuals, and it was an honor and privilege to work for them. But this is an opportunity I can’t let get away. So I’ve got a few more weeks at Asbury to wrap things up, and then I’ll be diving in right at the end of April.

Monocular

Today I picked up an Audubon Monocular that I have been eying for a couple months. It’s totally a toy – I have no practical need for it – but it’s very cool, and I’ve wanted one for a while. It’s like a teensy little telescope that I can fit into my pocket. The magnification is quite impressive, and I’ve had several opportunities to use it already to see things that are just a little too far away for my less-than-perfect eyes.

Arthur C Clarke: A legend passes

Arthur C Clarke

In August of 2006, while in Sri Lanka for ApacheCon, I had the opportunity to visit, briefly, with Sir Arthur C. Clarke in his home. We spoke very briefly, I shook his hand, and we took the above photograph. He was recovering from cataract surgery, so the photo was taken without a flash.

Today, he died, and the world is poorer for it. He was one of the greatest Sci Fi authors ever, and one of my favorite authors, of any genre.

I’m reminded that I met one of my other favorite authors, Douglas Adams, also at ApacheCon – that one in London, also very shortly before he died.

Here’s some more photos taken around Arthur C Clarke’s home. Not particularly good ones. The ones in my mind are much more vivid, as are all the stories that he ever told me.